Drawing on four years of ethnographic research with romance novel writers, we show how their affiliation with romance—a literary genre known for stories containing sexual content—prompted outsiders to sexually stigmatize them. Our work examines both the application and management of this stigma. We describe how outsiders applied the stigma in two ways: by conveying blatant disapproval through “sneering” and inviting writers to display a highly sexualized self through “leering.” Writers interpreted outsiders’ sneering as slut-shaming rhetoric and responded discursively to manage (...) the stigma; leering, however, sent a more complicated message that was harder for writers to manage. In revealing how these interactions threatened to strip writers of their sexual agency, our analysis suggests gender may be a primary mechanism by which stigma is applied and managed, which has theoretical implications for the stigmatization of women’s sexual selves. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns (...) of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface; R.Dallos -- Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff&J.Dillon -- Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas&P.Bracken -- Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle -- Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando -- The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper -- From 'Bad Character' to BPD: The Medicalization of 'Personality Disorder'; J.Bourne -- Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi -- (...) Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and 'Psychosis'; L.Johnstone -- Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere -- Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed -- The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon -- 'I'm Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs': The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter&M.Rapley -- The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff -- Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch -- Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double -- Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes -- Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail -- The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel -- What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon&M.Rapley -- Figure: Papers Using Term 'Antidepressant' On Medline 1957-1965 -- Index. (shrink)

DESCARTES’S PASSIONS OF THE SOUL AND THE CONTEMPORARY DISPUTE ABOUT THE NATURE OF EMOTION In my article I discuss the connection between the Cartesian theory of passions of the soul and the contemporary dispute between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Defenders of the cognitive theory of emotions identify emotions with judgments. On the other hand, non-cognitivists claim that emotions are feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. Both cognitivists’ and non-cognitivists’ approaches (...) meet serious problems. In the paper, I want to show that the Cartesian theory of passions can be considered an anticipation of contemporary views and a compromise between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Keywords: DESCARTES, NATURE OF EMOTION, SOUL, COGNITIVE AND NON-COGNITIVE THEORIES OF EMOTIONS. (shrink)

This book is a qualitative, interpretive, phenomenological, and interdisciplinary, examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Each chapter thematically focuses upon a particular food practice and on some key details of the examined practice, or on the practice’s social and cultural impact.

Qualitative data typically contain multiple identifiable characteristics about people, places and events, in the unique voice of each participant. This short report considers sensitivity and security of audio-recordings, drawing attention to a lack of guidelines for researchers on the preservation or destruction of such data. The authors urge debate on this issue, with due consideration to both ethics and scientific rigour.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

An impressive review of brain neurophysiology provides the basis for modelling the dynamics of transmission in neural circuits, using appropriate nonlinear mathematics. The coverage is unbalanced, however: the parallel dynamics at the level of behaviour and sensory-cognitive processes are sparsely addressed, so the final chapter fails to indicate the complexity and subtlety of relevant modern work.

Alternative models of similarity judgments that do not rest on metric space assumptions are known to be better descriptions of actual human behaviour but are ignored by Edelman. The internal spaces he postulates are a convenient fiction for artificial intelligence, but not compatible with what is now known about psychophysics at both behavioural and neurological levels of perceptual processing.

Chow's account of Bayesian inference logic and procedures is replete with fundamental misconceptions, derived from secondary sources and not adequately informed by modern work. The status of subjective probabilities in Bayesian analyses is misrepresented and the cogent reasons for the rejection by many statisticians of the curious inferential hybrid used in psychological research are not presented.

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

This book discusses Alasdair MacIntyre’s engagement with Marxism from the early 1950s to the present. It begins with his early writings on Marxism and Christianity, moving through his period in the New Left and the Socialist Labour League and International Socialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. It then discusses MacIntyre’s break with Marxism by developing the brief but telling five-point critique he gives of Marxism in his 1981 volume After Virtue. Marxism, Ethics and Politics highlights MacIntyre’s continuing admiration for (...) much in Marx’s thought, noting that his contemporary project is developed in response to what he now sees as the inadequacies of Marxism, particularly Marxist politics. It concludes by examining the place of Marxism in the contemporary MacIntyrean debate and by pointing out the contested nature of the claims about Marxism that MacIntyre makes. (shrink)

The essays collected in this issue offer complementary critical perspectives on the mature lyric work of Derek Walcott, the acclaimed Nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The centerpiece of the ensemble is a previously unpublished essay in which Walcott’s reflections on poetics illuminate his project in the masterpiece, _Omeros._ Other contributions by literary scholars in North America and the Caribbean focus on fundamental dimensions of Walcott’s craft and on such thematic preoccupations as the intersection of pictorial and (...) verbal modes of representation, the deployment of nuanced intertextual strategies, the invention of a viable artistic identity in a postcolonial intercultural milieu, and the psychosocial modeling of the process of literary apprenticeship. _Contributors. _Edward Baugh, Peter Burian, Gregson Davis, Carol Dougherty, Joseph Farrell, Judith Harris, Timothy Hofmeister, Derek Walcott. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

An imagined retrospective of apocalyptic art.

Reading is an affective and reflective relationship with a text, whether it is a new, groundbreaking monograph or one of those books that keeps getting pulled off the shelf year after year. Unlike traditional reviews, the pieces in this section may veer off in new directions as critical reading becomes an extended occurrence of thinking, being, and creation. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Although one can endorse the complexity of the data and processes that Phillips & Singer (P&S) review, their mathematical suggestions can be compared critically with cases in nonlinear psychophysics, where the theoretician is faced with analogous problems. Owing to P&S's failure adequately to recognise both the intricate properties of nonlinear dynamics in networks and the constraints of metabolic demands on the temporal generation of patterns in biological nets their conclusions fail to meet the problems they properly address.

Neoliberalism, in various ways, is radically new. It is nevertheless constructed from the conditions of liberal modernity, the inadequacies of which are crucial to neoliberal success. Liberalism in practice restricts moral agency through an impoverished, structurally-reinforced conception of practical reasoning, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, and this is important to understanding neoliberal durability. This article argues that a bureaucratic culture that fails to evaluate or critically question the ends it pursues is both symptomatic of liberal inadequacies and a key factor in (...) neoliberal success. Beyond its purely explanatory power, there is a political relevance to MacIntyre’s Aristotelian-inspired politics of local community. It is from those practices and communal movements that embody alternative conceptions of the good, that those interested in resisting neoliberalism can learn how it becomes possible to successfully challenge aspects of the contemporary social order. (shrink)

According to the paradigm view in linguistics and philosophical semantics, it is lexical semantics plus the principle of compositionality that allows us to compute the meaning of an arbitrary sentence. The job of LS is to assign meaning to individual expressions, whereas PC says how to combine these individual meanings into larger ones. In this paper I argue that the pair LS + PC fails to account for the discourse-relevant meaning of normative ‘ought’. If my hypothesis is tenable, then the (...) failure of LS + CS extends to normative language in general. The reason I offer that this is so is that semantics for normative language is, in an important respect, a substantive semantics. The ‘substantive’ in question means that the meaning of normative vocabulary in use is driven by metanormative views associated with a particular normative concept. SS rejects the model LS + CS and replaces it with a discourse-relevant semantics built around an interactional principle that ascribes to a particular surface syntactical form of ‘ought’ sentences a logical form that represents its discourse-salient normative content. In the paper I shall sketch how SS works and why it is worth serious consideration. (shrink)

Artykuł opisuje widzenie praw i wolności w Kazaniach sejmowych Piotra Skargi. We wstępie ukazano dzieło jezuity w kontekście innych traktatów społeczno-politycznych XVI wieku. We właściwej części artykułu przedstawiono rozumienie praw przez kaznodzieję. Zaprezentowano różne ich kategorie. Następnie dowiedziono konieczności istnienia ustaw państwowych. Kolejno przybliżono cechy dobrych praw, czyli: sprawiedliwość, krzewienie cnoty i obronę czci Boskiej. Ukazano błędy w polskim prawodawstwie, wśród których na plan pierwszy wysuwa się zniesienie jurysdykcji sądów duchownych oraz pobłażliwe traktowanie morderców. Zobrazowano zależność praw od obyczajów. Podkreślono (...) znaczenie odpowiedniej władzy wykonawczej i przedstawiono kilka uwag w sprawie sądownictwa. W następnej części pracy przybliżono wizję wolności w dziele Skargi. Ukazano więc wartość złotej wolności szlacheckiej ze wskazaniem nieprawidłowości w jej pojmowaniu. Podniesiono złe traktowanie chłopów. Zwrócono uwagę na zagrożenia płynące ze strony innowierców. Kolejno przedstawiono cztery rodzaje wolności. Potem dowiedziono istnienia związku praw i wolności. Wykazano, że do zniewolenia często prowadzi grzech i dlatego należy zapewnić prawne wsparcie religii. Zobrazowano, że rolą praw jest ograniczenie sprawujących władzę — by nie naruszali autonomii innych. Stwierdzono, iż sprawiedliwe prawa mają chronić wszystkich członków narodu. Na końcu dowiedziono, iż posłuszeństwo prawu współgra z koncepcją wolności chrześcijańskiej — w jej tradycyjnym rozumieniu. (shrink)

The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue between, the universal standpoint emerging from the presentation of the biblical story of humankind and a contemporary perspective, pertaining to the reality of the viewers. Therefore, while pointing to the unique formal and structural uniformity of the cycle, which strengthens the idea of continuity (...) between the Old and the New Covenant and the role of the Israelites in the history of salvation, it also recognizes the potential of the plays to engage in the current stereotypes. The article examines how the Gospel account of Christ’s trial and death is modified through presenting the Jews as torturers, whitewashing the non-Jewish characters, and placing special emphasis on the question of Jewish ignorance. It is demonstrated how different theological and popular stances concerning the Jewish people are merged and reconciled in the Chester representation of the passion of Christ and it is argued that the plays in question retell the biblical story in such a way that the justification for the expulsion of the Jews from England could be derived from it. (shrink)

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together. By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to _Being and Time_, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a (...) form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive. (shrink)

A blueprint for social change showing how we can reverse the destructive attitudes that threaten our world.

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Reigning regulatory frameworks for biomedical research impose on researchers and research ethics committees an obligation to protect research participants from risks that are unnecessary, disproportionate to potential research benefits, and non-minimized. Where the research has no potential to produce results of direct benefit to the subjects and the subjects are unable to give consent, these requirements are strengthened by an additional condition, that risks should not exceed a certain minimal threshold. In this article, I address the question of whether there (...) should be limits of permissible risks in non-therapeutic research involving competent and healthy subjects. Some commentators argue that competent and informed individuals should have a right to participate even in extremely risky research and that research ethics committees should never reject studies because they are too dangerous. To use David Shaw's expression, competent volunteers should have ‘a right to participate in high-risk research’. I argue that this idea is ill-founded, as it does not take into account the social mission and complex collaborative nature of research practice as well as the inequity of power between researchers and subjects. Imposition of limits on permissible risks for healthy volunteers is justified by the need to protect research enterprise and the need to protect the weaker party, namely the subjects. Also, I suggest that the best way to set boundaries on research risks is to leave the judgment of risk acceptability to research ethics committees. (shrink)

Each year thousands of individuals enrol in clinical trials as healthy volunteers to earn money. Some of them pursue research participation as a full-time or at least a part-time job. They call themselves professional or semiprofessional guinea pigs. The practice of paying healthy volunteers raises numerous ethical concerns. Different payment models have been discussed in literature. Dickert and Grady argue for a wage-payment model. This model gives research subjects a standardised hourly wage, and it is based on an assumption that (...) research participation is morally indistinguishable from other forms of unskilled labour. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that human guinea pigging has particular characteristics which taken together make it significantly different from other forms of labour. Participation in research is skill-independent. Healthy volunteers are valuable not because they are skilful persons, but because they are human bodies. The role of research volunteers is mainly passive. They are not asked to produce goods or deliver services. They are paid for enduring unpleasant, painful and risky interventions performed by investigators. Research volunteering involves inherent risks and uncertainties, and subjects have little or no control over their minimisation and materialisation. I conclude that participation in clinical research is a specific kind of activity. It is more like renting out one’s body to strangers, than working. Thus, research participation should not be treated on par with other forms of employment. (shrink)